(Tiberius)
I will no longer work for the federal government of the United States of America. I resigned my position after more than twenty years of service. I did this knowing that I was giving up on many benefits and characteristics of job stability that the vast majority of Americans do not have, for an uncertain future and possible poverty. Why? Because every year since at least 2012, what I experienced at work made me profoundly uncomfortable, building up inside me a cognitive dissonance between the meaning of the words of my oath and my agency's charter, on the one hand, and everything that was happening in the culture of the federal workforce, especially the secret portion, on the other. Yes, I was a spook, spy, agent, analyst, etc., but most of all, what I really was, I gradually understood, was an Apparatchik in the Ministry of Truth. That's far from good enough, and I am profoundly sorry that it took me this long to see that. I refuse to serve in a government that practices censorship, encourages group-think, terrorizes the citizenry, breaks it's own laws, and violates human rights.
I started out to be a dedicated civil servant in our federal defense bureaucracy, 15 years ago. Before that, I toiled in uniform for the same massive entity, just in a different department. I have over 27 years of experience with the United States "defense" establishment. To be more specific, I was in the oxymoron business, aka "military intelligence." And to be even more specific, I worked for the strangely named National Security Agency. (More another time about why I find the name to be strange.) Did I retire? No, I am a little too young to retire. I did earn a retirement annuity, which I can collect later on in life, if this corrupt enterprise known as the USG can stay solvent. I resigned. In the middle of an economic downturn, as a wave of inflation is cresting, I gave up on a six-figure salary and all those nice federal benefits. Why on earth would someone do that?
I am old enough to remember the Cold War, and I am a student of history. Or at least, most of the time, looking at what passes for contemporary culture makes me bitter and ill, so I tend to look back. Understanding the Cold War period helps me understand myself and my upbringing, and how so many of the people who raised me were so very wrong. I was born smack dab in the middle of that era, and it had much influence on my life. During my formative years, I read books by Orwell and Huxley, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and Koestler. Also C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. And Heinlein. Among others. Books about the seductive nature and danger of a totalitarian state. (A state with total power over the individual.) I was fed a diet of ideals and principles, and I imbibed a naive belief in truth and the American way. I knew there were problems in the USA and I studied them in a typical liberal arts education, and grew up in a college town which I think had some ideological pluralism. (Now I'm not so sure.) Somewhere, despite the chic of cynicism of that time, I adopted a belief that only the bad guys practiced censorship and suppression of information.
But that is not so. We live in a society which, due to a wide range of distractions, drugs, and technology, is far more "total" than any which have come before, save that of the New China, perhaps. More on that "adversary" another time.
Anyone familiar with the HBO depiction of the nuclear plant accident at Chernobyl will be familiar with the scene, font from which many memes have sprung, wherein the Soviet general personally thanks all the soldiers who served as human robots to clear the highly radioactive debris from the roof of the reactor building. These soldiers were all exposed to high doses of radiation that would drastically shorten their lives. This was a real event, and it's a perfect allegory for what government and patriotism can do to waste young men's lives.
In the old communist USSR, which was purportedly a union of independent socialist republics, people knew that "there's no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia." These were both things called newspapers, a technology from centuries ago, and Izvestia was the official state source of news, and Pravda (truth) was the official propaganda outlet of the communist party. Citizens of the USSR were notably skilled at reading between the lines, and parroting the "party line." They had to be, because nothing was ever reported straight and true by the official media.
"There is no pravda in Izvestia, and no izvestia in Pravda."
Can you not admit that there are now a multitude of topics which we Americans are not allowed to address, otherwise we are "cancelled" by the mass media, Big Tech and their activated mob? Can you remember a time when that was not so? I certainly can.
What so many people fought for, during the Cold War, what gave them their higher motivational meaning over simple plain old corrupt profit, was that "our side," no matter what dirty tricks we used, had freedom, liberty, truth, democracy, etc. On our side, dissidents could speak freely and associate freely. The American Civil Liberties Union actually defended these rights for American Nazis in Illinois. Now the ACLU works to "cancel" those who say "dangerous words." If you cannot work or communicate online, or even rent or own property, because you have committed some politically incorrect sin, what is the moral superiority of our society over one that jails dissidents or exiles them to a "gulag" in Siberia?
I quit my federal job because the leadership regime within the NSA and the DoD are censoring and suppressing the expression of opinions and arguments that counter the official Narrative of the Biden administration and the Main Stream Media and Big Tech. That was my personal Red Line. This is happening on the internal, closed, internet which the agency uses. That network, you may be surprised to learn, houses many things which are similar to the public internet. There is an app that for better or worse is basically Twitter for intelligence analysts, sad to say. There are several facsimiles of Facebook. But I digress.
The shift to heavy handed control of speech within the classified intelligence agencies has it's main impetus from the Great Plague of 2020, or should we call it the Great Totalitarian Opportunity, or how about the Great Excuse to Hide from Reality in the Metaverse? As you may know, the current occupant of the White House announced in September 2021 that he was mandating that all federal employees and contractors get one of the shots that Big Pharma rolled out for the COOF COOF 2019.
I do not wish to address that huge topic here yet, except to express my fondest hope that, if you have a free mind and you have been paying attention, and have been gathering information not only from APPROVED channels, you know that there is more to the story than the official Narrative that the White House, the so-called federal medical experts, the Mass Media, and the Big Tech companies that control "social media" outlets are pushing. Also, a mandate is not a law. Sorry, but that is not due process. And I am a fan of law and due process.
For various reasons I was holding out against the mandate to "get the jabs," and I was undergoing the murky process of applying for an "accommodation" for my religious beliefs, to exempt me from having to undergo the mandated medical procedure. The process was confusing and frustrating, but I (fortuitously and almost accidentally) discovered that there were many people within the NSA that thought as I did. They were opposed to the medical procedure on the grounds of either health or religious reasons, or were opposed to the mandate itself, as a gross overreach of executive power by the presidential administration. I know some who decided to get the shots, but refused to share that information with NSA. Inside information revealed that many of the senior bureaucrats were reluctant to question or evaluate the religious beliefs of employees. Although the regime announced the decision on 8 September, it was many weeks before there was any clear process announced as to how to request an accommodation based on either religious or medical reasons. And there was, of course, no consideration for the possibility that one already had natural immunity to the big scary disease.
The propaganda aspect I mentioned really started in late 2020, getting thicker and thicker as 2021 progressed, in all internal agency messaging. The "vaccines" were "safe and effective" and COOF COOF 2019 is just so dang dangerous and there were so many millions of "cases," so you better get on board, and submit, okay? They started tracking the numbers based on self-reporting beginning in mid-2021, I think it was June, perhaps earlier. They wanted to gather all this private medical information, of every employee, with supporting documentation, but lawyers warned that the strong medical privacy laws forbade that. So they asked everyone to report when they had the jabs, and which insidious cocktail they got, and when and where, but they were not allowed to require it, until after the infernal executive order 666 of 8 September.
Meanwhile, one of my sons was set to graduate basic training as a newly minted Marine in mid-November. We stayed in the vicinity of Parris Island in order to experience his graduation week. I was able to meet and talk with a few of the other parents and family members. Many people were there, and they came from all over the portions of this America known derisively to the Coastal Elites as "flyover country." They decorated their vehicles with temporary spray-on graffiti messages proudly proclaiming their identity as Marine families and the name of their Marine, and so on and so forth. On the first day we signed in at the visitor center and we noticed that some very large groups had signed in to visit one single Marine graduate, as in, 27 people making this trip, taking a week off from school and work to attend their Marine's graduation. I was in a group of just two people. We hadn't thought of decorating our vehicle or making large signs with our son's name or likeness, as other families did. We were a little chagrined. Within my own extended family, I am the only one to have served since the World War Two era. None of my relatives ever attended a single one of my military graduation ceremonies.
I mention this excursion because what I experienced during the trip made it clear to me that I did not have to continue my career. It gave me a new confidence that I could find a way to live that is truer to who I am and what I think is right and true. Lest you think that I am disparaging the people I met as "salt of the earth," no, I am from Appalachia myself. I have studied my roots online and I found only working people. Working in the nation's capital, within the government, and within the secret portion of the government, is to be part of an elite class. Or perhaps, a better word is "privileged," though that word has become so overladen with meaning recently, thanks to the Academy. "Out of touch" or "deluded" would be even more descriptive of this class.
During the trip I learned through a group chat that two of my colleagues were resigning, and that their farewell messages to the agency workforce were censored. There has long been a website at NSA called "Parting Thoughts." There was a tradition of retiring employees posting reflections on their careers, fondest memories, best jobs, teams, or projects, best or worse bosses (no names), etc. During the past decade, a new trend popped up of young STEM employees quitting rather than having long careers at NSA. On Parting Thoughts the posts became more typically postings by younger people listing the many reasons why they were leaving the agency in frustration. The agency has been hemorrhaging STEM talent for a long time now. Sometimes a parting thought would go viral within the agency, and someone would tell me to read it. I tried to avoid spending my time on the internal blogs, because, for one, I didn't think it was my job to read blog posts, and it was frankly depressing to read about how the best and brightest found the bureaucracy too stultifying to stay.
I can't divulge most of what I did at NSA, but I was not in a STEM field. I can vouch for the frustrating and creativity-crushing aspects of the bureaucracy. More on that in another post. I, Tiberius, am an old centurion, and my first principle seems to always have been, looking back on my travails, utility. To be of use. To engage in activities that are useful. I am perhaps not much of a strategic thinker, at least not in a bureaucratic atmosphere. I could never see over any horizon within an office. No, to be fair to myself, I could see some things, in terms of what kind of training for personnel was necessary to plan for. But my point is that I, mule-like, put my head down and bore the loads I was set to carry. The problem was that, in spite of myself, I became more conscious of the maneuvers and agendas around me. All this made me doubt, in spite of the day to day busy-ness of the office, and the weekly and monthly achievements, the ultimate value of what I was doing.
What hit me hard, during my son's graduation from Boot Camp, was learning that my fellow dissenters' posts were taken down, one within mere minutes. This was shocking to me. On Parting Thoughts there was a long-standing tradition of free speech, as long as the poster did not libel any person or incite violence; you may remember what we used to regard as the usual rules of decorum and civil speech. I did not know these two people very well, but they struck me as rational and intelligent. I decided for myself, there in the Parris Island Marine Recruit Training Depot, to read these posts for myself, and then make my own decision. (Other colleagues had saved copies of the posts and I knew they were waiting for me in my work email inbox.) When we got home, even though it was a weekend, I went to the office to read those posts in privacy. What I read put me over the top, and I submitted my notification of intention to resign on a Sunday.
How could I do any less than the nurses and truck drivers and airplane pilots, that were resisting? Someday I hope to learn the statistics, how many people in each profession walked away from their jobs rather than comply with tyranny. I fear that I will learn that a far larger proportion of nurses quit than federal employees.
Thank for you having the integrity to quit. I pray more will follow suit as their consciences weigh on them. I look forward to reading/learning more.
Thank you for your service to your fellow citizens of this great nation. I am glad that you’re on substack and I look forward to your commentaries as I suspect you’ll have insights that the vast majority of substackers can only speculate about.